The quadrennial policy platforms of the two major U.S. political party are now on the books, with the Republican Platform having been approved by the national convention earlier this week and the draft Democratic Platform having been almost unanimously approved by the Platform Committee July 16.

The two documents are very different. The Democratic Platform is a mammoth document – an 80-page PDF (single spaced) of around 42,000 words. It is a traditional party platform in that it is a long laundry list of policies and accomplishments and was obviously assembled by a large committee with instructions that more, not less, was better.

The Republican Platform, by contrast, is only around 5,400 words. A much longer platform, perhaps more traditional, was reportedly junked last week when Donald Trump’s inner circle dropped this version on the Platform Committee and told them to vote for it, which they did. The new version waters down the anti-abortion and anti-LGBGTQ policies that had been in previous GOP platforms, and adds a certain defiance of modern punctuation rules that (a) looks a lot like Trump’s social media posts and (b) hearkens back to the Founding, before punctuation and capitalization rules had been standardized (just read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution and see how in love with capital letters the Founders were).

We don’t know if any transportation policy specifics were in the original Republican draft, but there were, they didn’t make it to the final version. The only mention of transportation in the Republican Platform is this: “Republicans will revive the U.S. Auto Industry by reversing harmful Regulations, canceling Biden’s Electric Vehicle and other Mandates, and preventing the importation of Chinese vehicles.”

That’s it.

This does indeed draw a distinction with the Democratic Platform, which says “Transportation is America’s biggest emitter, responsible for a third of emissions. The Administration has put us on track to eliminate all carbon from the sector by 2050. It’s making generational investments in transportation infrastructure, including in cleaner shipping, trucking, transit, rail, and aviation. It issued the toughest-ever fuel economy and tailpipe standards, so new cars both get better mileage, and reduce emissions per mile by as much as 50 percent.

A clearer contrast between agendas on a specific subject, you cannot find.

On infrastructure in general (separate from protecting “critical infrastructure” from cyber threats), all the GOP platform says is “Common Sense tells us clearly that if we don’t have Domestic Manufacturing with low Inflation, not only will our Economy—and even our Military Equipment and Supplies—be at the mercy of Foreign Nations, but our Towns, Communities, and People cannot thrive. The Republican Party must return to its roots as the Party of Industry, Manufacturing, Infrastructure, and Workers. President Trump’s economic policy to end Inflation and return Manufacturing Jobs is not only what the American Economy and American Workers need right now, it is also what they want right now.”

The Democratic Platform says “We can’t have the best economy in the world if we don’t have the best infrastructure. And for generations, American infrastructure was the envy of the world. But over the years, we stopped investing in it, and we fell to thirteenth in infrastructure rankings. The Trump Administration declared it “Infrastructure Week” every week for four years, and never built a thing. But under President Biden, we’re finally rebuilding our roads, bridges, ports, airports, water systems, electric grids, broadband, and more, paving the way for a great American “Infrastructure Decade” that will create hundreds of thousands of good-paying union jobs.

Democrats say that if you want to know the specifics of the GOP agenda, don’t look at the Platform, look at the “Project 2025” book produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the transportation chapter of which was written by Diana Furtchgott-Roth, a senior USDOT official during Trump’s first term.

However, President Trump says he has never heard of Project 2025, and his senior advisers say they have nothing to do with it. While the Heritage group that produced it is full of former Trump officials, it bears remembering that Trump had an official transition team in 2016 led by Chris Christie that had offices and vetted thousands of resumes and came up with any number of black binders of policy and management proposals – and Trump himself came in and blew it all up on November 22, 2016, starting over almost from scratch with a new transition process under Vice President-elect Pence. If anyone is capable of an abrupt pivot and walking away from somebody else’s carefully laid plans, it is DJT.

We thought we’d re-publish an expanded version of our highlights document showing the transportation portions of various major party platforms since 1840, which you can read here.